Attacked on his schedule, Donald Trump says he works more than his predecessors
Already accused of playing golf and watching television, the president is said to start his day with long hours without a specific assignment.
It finally took a week for Donald Trump to respond to those who accuse him of spending more time doing nothing than actually working.
A controversy born a week earlier from the publication, by the Axios site, of the presidential timetable. However, according to these documents, if the American president is an early riser, he does not really get to work very quickly.
According to Axios, in fact, the first five hours of Donald Trump's day are generally placed under the sign of "executive time". A vague formula that leaves room for many interpretations.
Almost 300 hours of executive time in four months
And the White House's first response to the news site, explaining that Trump simply had "a different style than his predecessors" and that "the results spoke for themselves," was clearly not enough. From then on, the controversy, which may pass for anecdotal on this side of the Atlantic, was taken seriously enough in Washington for an investigation into the origin of the leak to be decided.
Yet this is not the first time that Axios has tackled this subject. He had published information going in the same direction in January 2018 and was already attacking the vagueness of “executive time”. But, until now, there had been no response from Donald Trump himself on this point.
It is true that the information gleaned by Axios is sufficiently precise this time around for the site to reconstruct the presidential schedule of recent months and show that it differs from that officially available.
According to calculations made by Axios, between November 7 and February 1, this "executive time" would have lasted a little more than 297 hours. While, over the same period, the US president would have spent only 77 hours in meetings, 51 hours on the move, 38 hours at events and 39 hours at lunches.
And the site reaffirms that, during this "executive time", Donald Trump would rather spend his mornings watching television, reading the newspapers and, of course, being active on Twitter.
Trump is on the front line
On Sunday, the president therefore rose to the front line himself. “When you use the Executive Time formula, I usually work, I don't rest,” he tweeted.
Before adding, without real modesty, "in fact, probably, I work more than almost any other former president". The opportunity to launch a new spike against his predecessor, Barack Obama. "The reality is that when I took office as president, our country was a mess," he explained, adding that he had "had no choice but to work very long hours! "
On the phone from 6.30 a.m.
For his part, his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, also responded on Sunday. And affirmed on NBC that the "executive time is used for the president to prepare for the next meeting and to take stock of the previous meeting".
“His phone calls start at 6.30 am and continue until 11 pm. So I can assure you that the gentleman works more than what is listed in his calendar, ”he also assured.
Golf and television
Nothing says that this will be enough for his opponents to stop pointing fingers at the presidential timetable. This is indeed not the first time that Donald Trump has been attacked on this point. Last June, the ABC channel calculated, for example, that Donald Trump had spent a quarter of his time playing golf since his inauguration.
Previously, a count made by the "New York Times" revealed that the president spends between 4 and 8 hours a day in front of television. Affirmations that he quickly qualified as “fake news”.
